The spell apothecary was small and cramped. The white shelves filling the walls were yellowing and peeling from age, but were neatly organized and well stocked.
There was only room for two other people in the tiny shop. One was a short woman wearing a leather duster and enough piercings and jewelry to make Ciaran envious. The other was the shopkeeper, crammed behind a shallow checkout stand, who shouted in Coastal that no dogs were allowed the instant they stepped inside. Ciaran balked, and for a split second considered refusing, but at Asra’s glare he realized drawing attention was not a good idea. He took Bane outside and put him in a sit-stay, then returned inside.
Ciaran picked two small lodestones and the ingredients needed for the disguising spell. He hoped he remembered everything; he admittedly hadn’t paid attention to much of Vincent’s rambling about his spells.
Asra picked out small jars full of substances Ciaran couldn’t name, sometimes thoughtfully analyzing them before passing them to him to hold. She warned him to be careful with them, and he nodded. His eyes wandered around the store before resting on the other woman.
She was short and fair-skinned with black eyes. The sides of her jet black hair were shaved short. As she turned to smile at Ciaran, the light from the storefront windows glinted against an impressively large ring hanging from her nose.
“Nice dog,” she said.
Ciaran was always happy to talk about his dog. “Yes he is, thank you. He’s saved my neck more times than I can count.”
“You ain’t worried someone’s gonna run off with him?” She spoke in Royal, but had a thick accent common to some of the cities to the north, most apparent in the way she said dawg and awff.
Ciaran laughed. “I’d be more worried about the thief. They’d lose an arm before I lost a dog. He’s a trained protection dog.”
“Yeah? Where do you get one of them?”
Asra gave him a pointed glare as she dropped a couple more jars in his arms.
“He was a gift,” Ciaran said. “From a good friend back home.”
Asra dragged him by the arm to the shopkeeper. The man rang the items up as the other woman continued, “Is your home out west, near the capital? You got that fancy accent from around there.”
Ciaran nodded, and Asra gripped his upper arm in warning, where the woman couldn’t see the gesture. “We’re headed back now.”
“That explains why you’re buying half the store,” the woman said as Ciaran passed a small stack of royals to the cashier. “So are you two together or … ?”
“None of your business,” Asra snapped.
Ciaran looked back at Asra in surprise. He hadn’t expected her to have a jealous streak.
“Down, girl,” the woman said, grinning. Ciaran was amazed Asra managed not to snarl at her. “I was just wondering if you were traveling alone. It’s not safe to go out in the badlands without protection. I’d be happy to offer my services.”
“We have protection,” Asra said.
“I see,” the woman said. She nodded her head towards the silver band on Asra’s wrist. “I like your bracelet. Silver’s very pretty. Shame my ears are too sensitive for it.”
She reached up to flick one of her own earrings—titanium, most likely. It had become a popular choice for jewelry in the last few years. She had to have had at least a dozen piercings in each ear, in addition to the ones on her nose, each of varying size and shape and color. The sight made Ciaran feel even more naked without his own jewelry.
Asra snatched the change from the shopkeeper's outstretched hand and said, “Let’s go.”
“I apologize,” Ciaran said, turning to extend his hand to the woman. “We’re in a bit of a rush. It was a pleasure to meet you.”
The woman accepted his handshake, firm and confident, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “At least one of you has manners.”
As Ciaran turned to help Asra load the bottles into a bag, he knocked a glass vial of fine blue powder onto the floor, and it rolled behind his feet. Asra groaned and bent down to pick it up. Ciaran tried to step out of her way, but instead stepped directly on the fragile glass, sending a puff of blue dust straight into Asra’s face. She yelped, then sneezed six times in quick succession. Ciaran hoisted her up by the arm as she started another sneezing fit. She started shoving the remaining jars into the bag.
“Get them—” She sneezed again. “Get them in the bag and let’s go!”
Ciaran scooped up the last few jars and dumped them in the bag as Asra darted out of the store. Ciaran turned to apologize to the other patron, but she was backed into the corner, covering her nose with her sleeve. She waved to him with her other hand. Unsure of how to gracefully exit the situation, Ciaran waved back and apologized to the shopkeeper in Coastal.
He raced out, calling Bane to follow as he passed him. Asra was already out of sight, but it wasn’t difficult to follow the sounds of rapid sneezing. He finally caught up to her a couple blocks down in a short alley. She grabbed him by the arm and pushed him against the wall.
“I told you to be careful with those!” She turned as another round of sneezes racked her body. Bane sniffed at the blue powder that dusted Ciaran’s pant leg, then let out a large sneeze himself.
“Keep him away from that!” Asra said, kicking at the dog. “Get it off your pants.”
“What is this stuff?” Ciaran asked, stepping away from the two of them and brushing the substance off his legs.
“Hound’s woe! It fucks with dogs’ sense of smell. You might as well have told that woman that I’m a shapechanger!” She sneezed again, then pulled out a cloth and a bottle of water from her bag. She dampened the cloth and wiped off her face and neck. “I told you to be careful, but you were too busy flirting to pay attention.”
“I wasn’t flirting,” Ciaran said, straightening himself. “I was making polite conversation. I realize you’re unfamiliar with the concept.”
His cheeks warmed. Of course Asra hadn’t been jealous of the woman—she’d been suspicious. He was foolish for ever thinking otherwise.
“I don’t need you being a smart ass right now,” Asra said. Her eyes were red and puffy, her nostrils swollen. “That woman is gonna rat us out for the bounty and guards are gonna be on us any second. And we still have to get your damn horse.”
“You’re being paranoid. She was just chatting.” He helped her put her rucksack on, then took the cloth from her and wiped off Bane’s nose, just to be safe.
“Well, I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
----------------------------------------
Ciaran spent the next few days trying to reconcile the image he’d had of Asra for his whole life with the woman he’d gotten to know over the past couple weeks.
The sun was now low on the horizon, the sky a blazing yellow-orange. The buzz of summer insects had been replaced with the ruckus of evening frogs and toads, something that seemed to greatly perturb Asra.
He craned his neck back to look at her. She walked a fair way behind and to the side of the mare Ciaran rode, whom she surveilled with intense distrust. Her coat glowed orange in the sun’s dying rays, which glinted off her fangs each time she flashed them at the horse for a perceived slight. These slights included breathing too loudly, or shaking her mane too vigorously.
Bane trotted between the two of them, and any time Asra growled at the mare, Bane would dance on his hind legs, stretching up to lick Asra’s chin, his ears pinned back and tail wagging low. It seemed he did not like the tension between the shapechanger and the horse, and he was politely asking them to be friends.
Ciaran turned forward again before Asra caught him smiling. The idea that the nightmare that had haunted him since he was a little boy could be frightened by such common things as water and horses seemed preposterous.
Nolan had once told him shapechangers were agents of chaos intent on sowing discontent amongst the commoners. They sought an idealistic alternative to the monarchy, ignorant of the actual pressures and responsibilities of ruling a kingdom. There’s always someone who thinks they can lead better than you can, he’d told Ciaran. And after everything he’d experienced with Asra over the last couple weeks, that seemed believable. She clearly had no respect for the crown or its laws.
Ciaran had also grown more understanding of Nolan’s increasing paranoia since Asra began her slaughter a decade ago. Anyone would go mad with her looming over them, not knowing where she was or when she would strike again. The blame for Nolan’s descent into madness could be placed solely on her shoulders, and he couldn’t help but hate her for it.
Which led him to a problem: What would he do with Asra when they’d accomplished their goal? He didn’t expect her to peacefully return home with how deep-set her hatred was towards the monarchy and Ciaran’s family. But after everything she’d done to save Bane, he couldn’t bring himself to have her executed, and the thought of imprisoning her for the rest of her life made him queasy for numerous reasons …
“What are you looking at?”
Ciaran hadn’t realized he’d been staring at Asra again. He whipped his head back around and said, “Nothing,” but it was too late.
She trotted up to walk in line with the horse, though she kept a considerable distance from the steed. Asra was almost the same height as the mare at the withers, but Ciaran’s head still sat several inches above Asra’s. He appreciated even this slight sense of authority.
“You’ve been staring at me all afternoon,” Asra said. “You got something you want to say?”
Ciaran was not about to reveal to her what he’d been pondering—that would be a death sentence. He cast out in his mind for any safer topic.
Unfortunately, the first thing that popped into his thoughts was, “What happened to your ear?”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry, I meant … ” Ciaran swallowed. Out of all the things to ask her, why was that what his mind had landed on? “That first night we met, in the palace, when we were children … both of your ears were drop ears. So for it to stand up like that it would need to be cropped and posted. But it doesn’t look like it was intentionally cropped. It looks like it was shredded. So I was just wondering how … ”
Ciaran hoped Asra didn’t secretly have the ability to shoot flames from her eyes. He cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry, that was a rather insensitive thing to ask.”
“Yeah, no fucking kidding.”
Asra darted forward to put distance between herself and the others. Ciaran sighed and nudged his horse into a canter, calling for Bane to follow. He couldn’t allow himself to get too soft on Asra. There would very likely come a time when he would have to choose between her life and his own.
Nolan had always joked that Ciaran’s downfall would come in the form of a beautiful woman or a dangerous dog, and Asra managed to be both.
----------------------------------------
They made camp late that night, after over an hour of Ciaran asking to stop. He finally put his foot down when the horse was too exhausted to continue. He slowed the mare to a halt, dismounted, and unsaddled her, ignoring all of Asra’s protests.
“We’re miles away from the closest town,” Ciaran said as he removed the horse’s bit. His hands shook so much it took a couple tries to hang the bridle over a low-hanging branch. “And no one is following us.”
“You have no idea if that’s true,” Asra said, looming over Ciaran with her fangs bared. “And we’re not moving fast enough in the first place. We’ll never make it back at this rate.”
“And we’ll go even more slowly if the horse keels over and dies from exhaustion,” Ciaran said as he dumped some grain mix into a bucket for the mare. “Even if that woman does know who you are, what does it matter?”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“That’s exactly what you said about Vincent!”
Ciaran shrugged. His exhaustion and hunger were getting to his nerves, and he didn’t trust himself to speak. He dumped some of the grains onto the ground for Bane, along with some beef jerky from his bag, all of which Bane inhaled.
Asra groaned and changed back into her human form. She fished clothes out of her bag and dressed, then pulled out some of the spell ingredients.
Ciaran shoved a handful of dried fruit in his mouth as he watched her drop several lodestones, each roughly the size of an apple, onto the ground. Asra sprinkled the contents of some of the jars from the apothecary over them. She dug shallow holes in a circle with a roughly ten foot diameter around Ciaran, Bane, and the horse, then placed a lodestone in each of these holes. Then, she grabbed the bottle of powdered hound’s woe and thrust it into Ciaran’s hand.
“I thought this stuff makes you violently sick?” he said as he took it. “Why are we keeping it around?”
“I need it for the spell,” Asra said. Her voice was thin and tight. She pointed to the holes in the ground. “You need to put a tiny amount on each lodestone. A tiny amount.”
Ciaran didn’t have the energy to protest. He shoved another fistful of fruit into his mouth and tapped a dusting of the powder onto each orb. Asra followed behind him, covering each hole with dirt, then pressing a single piece of potpourri into the damp earth.
“What’s that for?” Ciaran asked.
“The hound’s woe keeps me from being able to smell the lodestones. I need a way to sniff them out.”
Ciaran examined the bottle more closely. He’d never seen it in a powdered form before. In the capital city, hound’s woe was a restricted substance. Smugglers often used it to hide illicit goods—mostly drugs—from the royal dogs. Regulations must have become lax in the years since his dogs had passed.
The delicate, floral scent of the potpourri caught his attention. “It smells amazing. Where did you get it?”
“I made it myself. From some flowers I grow at home.”
Ciaran furrowed his brow. He pictured Asra in a summer dress, tending to a flower garden in the countryside, and almost laughed at the absurdity of it.
As Asra pressed the last piece of potpourri into the final patch of soil, she glanced around, counting the other lodestones. She took a deep breath and pulled a knife from her pocket.
“What are you—?” Ciaran began.
He cut off the rest of his own question as he turned and winced at the sight of Asra running the blade across her upper arm. Blood dripped from the wound. She swiped her fingers across the gash, then headed to Bane. She applied the blood into an intricate shape on his shoulder, then repeated the gesture to the horse’s flank.
By the time Asra approached Ciaran, the shallow cut on her arm had already healed. She pulled the knife back out of her pocket, and before Ciaran could protest, made another slice into her arm.
Asra grabbed Ciaran’s wrist in a grip so tight he didn’t dare try to pull away from her. Her eyes locked with his, and he swallowed. The intensity of her glare sent gooseflesh up his arms.
“If you ever try to harm my people,” she said, her voice as low as a predator’s snarl, “I will hunt you down, just like your brother. I will not rest until you are dead. Do you understand me?”
“Asra, what is this—”
She squeezed his wrist so hard that his words died off with a yelp.
“Do you understand me?” she repeated.
“Yes, of course!”
She relaxed her grip on him enough for the pain to recede, and he resisted the urge to yank his hand away from her. Her amber eyes flicked back and forth between Ciaran’s for a moment more before she finally sighed and looked down.
She swiped the fingers of her free hand across the stream of blood on her arm, then brought her blood-slick fingers to his bicep. She traced the same odd shape onto his skin that she’d drawn onto the horse’s and Bane’s fur, and before he could discern what it was, it vanished in a flash of light.
In the same instant, he was lifted by a wave of weightlessness, like the sensation he had on an amusement ride as it crested a hill. The feeling vanished as quickly as it came over him.
“What was that?” he asked.
“It was the spell activating.” Asra paused, and a nauseated expression overtook her face, as though she were deliberating whether she should confess to a crime. “It’s … a concealment spell.”
“How effective is it?”
Asra stood and folded her arms. Her eyes scanned the perimeter of the invisible circle as she said, “Not as good as others back home can make it. But hopefully good enough.” She rubbed the spot where she’d cut, fully healed once more. “Theoretically it should make us completely undetectable. As in, people could walk through us and not know we’re here. But … I wouldn’t count on that.” She sighed. “Hopefully it’s better than nothing.”
Ciaran sat and pulled a jar of peanuts out of his bag, then popped a handful into his mouth. He passed the jar to Asra as she sat next to him, and he hoped she didn’t notice how much his hands still shook.
“We don’t have any spell like this,” he said. Vincent would froth at the mouth if he could get his hands on a spell this powerful. “How does it work?”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
Ciaran laughed and said, “What, is it a ‘if I told you, I’d have to kill you’ sort of thing?”
Asra’s silence chilled his blood.
His smile faltered. He thought of how long Nolan spent searching for the shapechangers before Asra was brought to the palace as a girl, and the way the shapechangers seemed to vanish into thin air after the attack.
“This is the spell your people use to hide your town, isn’t it?” he asked.
Asra stopped chewing for a moment, then resumed without a word to Ciaran.
“You told Nolan how the spell works, didn’t you?” he asked. “That night in the palace. That’s how he found your town to launch the attack.” He mentally ran through Asra’s actions as she’d performed the spell. “You need the correct symbol and … blood?” His brow furrowed. “Blood from someone who has access to the circle already. Is that right?”
Asra stood, pulled a sleeping sack out of her rucksack, and tucked herself in as far away from Ciaran as the spell circle would allow. He sighed, taking that as his cue that he had first watch tonight, then set to tidying up as much as he could.
He was halfway finished packing up the spell ingredients when he realized he still had the hound’s woe.
He examined the delicate jar. A powder that could make anything undetectable to Asra’s nose would be useful. He would need to test it to see just how potent it was. What could he test it on?
As he put the rest of the mess away, the remaining bottle of moonshine caught his eye. He froze. The thirst and the nausea were settling in, and his hands’ quivering was only growing more pronounced. It wouldn’t be long before he was in a sorry state.
He bit his lip. Hound’s woe was safe to consume, surely? He prayed to the gods that it was, then poured the gin into his canteen and tapped a small amount of hound’s woe in after it.
----------------------------------------
The next several days passed uneventfully. Ciaran felt they were making good distance, but Asra never agreed. She pushed them far beyond what anyone but she was capable of, and they ended each day cranky and exhausted. There were several times Ciaran tried to strike up conversation, just to break the monotony, but Asra never took the bait.
They were still at least three days out from the next town when the thunderstorm hit.
At first, Ciaran thought it was Bane’s whimpering to be let outside that had awoken him—dark clouds had threatened rain the previous evening, so they’d pitched a tent. But as the next boom of thunder struck, he knew the storm was responsible for his early rising. He rubbed his eyes and turned to Asra, hoping Bane hadn’t woken her, but her sleeping bag was empty.
He rose and peeked his head out the front of the tent. Asra lay there in her gazehound form, her clothes in shreds around her. Relief washed over his sleep-fogged mind, and he exited the tent, yawning as he said, “We don’t have to take turns sleeping anymore, Asra. Wasn’t that the whole point of the concealment spell?”
Asra didn’t respond. Ciaran rubbed his eyes and stepped closer. As he did so, he noticed the trembling that racked Asra’s entire canine body. He stepped around to see her face. Drool pooled around her muzzle, and her eyes were open but unfocused. Her claws gripped into the earth, leaving long grooves in the dirt.
Ciaran’s stomach lurched. He’d seen her nervous and uneasy before, but this abject terror before him was something entirely different. He reached out to stroke her shoulder, but before he could even register what happened, a snarl as loud as the thunder boomed in his face, scissor-like fangs gnashing mere centimeters away from his nose. He threw himself backwards and shielded his face with his arm.
But the next strike never came. When Ciaran opened his eyes again, Asra stood there, wide-eyed, tail tucked between her legs.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
Then she turned and stumbled away to the opposite side of the spell circle. She dropped to the ground, curling up into a tight ball, her trembling even more pronounced than before.
It took Ciaran a few moments to catch his breath. He only managed to do so when he felt Bane’s snout push underneath his hand. As he stroked the dog’s ears, his heart rate eased back to normal.
He spent enough time around dogs to know Asra had not intended to bite him. That had been an air snap—–a common warning in canine-speak. Dogs were incredibly precise and controlled with their jaws, and if she had meant to bite him, she would have. But the amount of terror she must have been experiencing to have such an animalistic reaction had to have been overwhelming.
Ciaran tried to pass it off as just another odd fear of hers. Noise phobias were relatively common in dogs, after all. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just witnessed something much deeper.
----------------------------------------
The next morning, Asra looked considerably like Ciaran felt after a long night of catering to nobles during a large ball. She stumbled across relatively flat terrain like she had four left feet, and several times Ciaran caught her dozing off as she walked.
She must not have had any sleep at all the night before. The storm had passed about an hour before they broke camp and headed off again, but Asra’s canine hearing would be able to hear the thunder long after Ciaran could.
“You know, we can stop for a rest whenever you would like,” Ciaran said as gently as possible.
It didn’t take years of social etiquette training to understand that Asra was embarrassed by her outburst last night, and definitely didn’t want to discuss it. She glared up at him from beneath drooping eyelids.
A moment later, Asra halted in her tracks, eyes wide.
“What is it?” Ciaran said, bringing the horse to a stop.
“Do you hear that?”
Ciaran listened for a moment, but heard nothing but chirping birds. “No.”
Bane and Asra’s ears perked in the same direction at the same time, and Bane let out a soft uff.
“Something’s following us,” Asra said.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, but we need to get going.”
Ciaran pulled out his map to double check their route. “We’ll have to take the tunnel.”
“The what?” Asra said, her head snapping around to look at Ciaran.
He held the paper down for Asra to see. “This one here, see? Cuts through the Weldstones.” He pointed to the mountain range on the map, then the winding tunnel that snaked through it.
Asra’s eyes were still wide. “What about that valley there? That looks shorter.”
“There’s a dragon nest there, and it’s the start of mating season.”
“So?”
Ciaran’s jaw went slack for a moment. “So? You’re practically the walking dead right now, and I’m certainly not capable of fighting dragons. We’ll need to take the tunnel.”
“We don’t have time to waste in that tunnel, and we’d be sitting ducks when whoever or whatever is following us catches up.”
“You didn’t get any sleep last night. You won’t stand a chance against a dragon. You’d be lucky to survive even in top shape.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
Ciaran groaned. “Hellhounds take you, why are you so stubborn? Isn’t this exactly why you were upset with me about the river incident? You’re overestimating your abilities and underestimating your exhaustion. It’s not worth saving a day of travel if we die.”
But Asra took off in the direction of the valley without a word. Ciaran swore and called Bane up into the saddle. He nudged his horse to follow her, doubtful he would even be able to keep up.
What had gotten into her? She’d always been irritatingly stubborn and headstrong, but she wasn’t stupid. She had to know rushing into a den of dragons was suicide.
After a few minutes, Asra slowed to a steady trot, and Ciaran slowed his horse to match. The poor mare’s sides heaved with her labored breathing, but Ciaran didn’t expect Asra to stop for her.
As they traversed further and further into dragon territory, Ciaran became more and more hopeful that the beasts hadn’t returned to mate yet. There were no tracks in the dirt, no broken treetops from a clumsy landing.
Asra stopped so abruptly that Ciaran’s horse nearly ran into her. He pulled the reins to guide the horse around the giant gazehound, who sniffed the air, spraying a mist of nose sweat with each exhale.
“What is it?” Ciaran asked. Then he smelled it, too—smoke and burning wood.
They crested the hill, and felt the heat of the blazing forest fire beneath them before they saw it. The dragons had returned, and they were clearing out their new nesting space.
“We need to go back,” Ciaran said, wheeling the horse around. “The tunnel entrance isn’t far.”
But before he could even nudge the horse forward, there was a massive gust of wind, then the ground shook like an earthquake. The mare reared up in a panic. Ciaran gripped the saddle horn, but Bane had no way to hold on. The dog scrambled for a hold and knocked both himself and Ciaran to the ground. The mare took off, and Ciaran twisted around to find Asra.
She faced away from him, the fur along her spine standing straight up. Her snarl reverberated through the ground, and the beast in front of her was unmistakable.
Smoke billowed from its nostrils, its silver scales glinting with a mirror-like shine in the light of the inferno below. Bright green sigils twisted their way all over its body. The dragon unfurled its leathery wings, bony horns prominent over its head as it reared back for its attack.